Listening to Reger

Abstract

My relationship to the music of Max Reger has been that of a fan, rather than a scholar. This is music that thrilled me and moved me deeply from my very first encounter with it, more than thirty years ago. However, Reger has hardly been a favored figure: most commentary on his music has tended to disparage it both in comparison with his contemporaries and with his obvious models, Bach and Brahms. In the case of the former, his music was thought to be too conservative, and in the case of the latter, insufficiently structured. For the most part I have kept my love of his music to myself, a private, even a guilty, pleasure. Over the years my estimation of Reger's music has grown, along with my intuitive satisfaction with it. I have found myself in increasing disagreement with the criticism that this music is, in effect, failed Brahms, and in fact I find that in interesting ways my understanding of it has very strong parallels with what I find engages me most about his contemporary Arnold Schoenberg's response to this moment in music history. In the following I will begin to illustrate this by offering what I believe is the framework that allows me to enjoy this music in its own right. Admittedly, my approach is both ahistorical and personal. It in no way claims to trace what Reger himself might have thought about his music, and indeed he might have found it antithetical to his way of thinking. For example, I find enharmonic equivalence to be an absolute identity in his music, for all intents and purposes, but that might seem odd to the musician who published a model modulation from C-sharp major to D-flat major.1 I am more concerned here with how I am going about making sense of his music than in how he conceived it. Furthermore, my approach owes a great debt to a number of people, in particular Richard Kaplan, Dora Hanninen, Robert Morris, Karl Schrock, and Ramon Satyendra. Conversations I have had with all of them over the years have been invaluable in helping me think about much of the following. Many theories of chromaticism take diatonic tonality as their underlying basis, deriving chromatic chords and functions from alterations of the diatonic scale and the functions associated with its scale degrees. Chromatically altered chords tend to carry a certain directional weight through voice-leading implications of resolution or continuation, and while equal temperament offers opportunities for enharmonic punning, it still carries with it the sense that it represents the more implicative